FOOTNOTES:
[119] Shakespeare's 'Merry Gentlemen,' in the Saturday Review, February 26th, 1898.
[120] Concerning Shaw's general attitude towards Shakespeare, compare the Letter from Mr. G. Bernard Shaw appended to Tolstoy on Shakespeare. Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1906.
[121] Blaming the Bard, in the Saturday Review, September 26th, 1896.
[122] As Mr. Will Irwin has it in his Crankidoxology: Being a Mental Attitude from Bernard Pshaw:
I'm bored by mere Shakespere and Milton,
Tho' Hubbard compels me to rave;
If I should lay laurels to wilt on
That foggy Shakesperean grave,
How William would squirm in his grave!
[123] One day at a reception at the Playgoers' Club, in London, Mr. Osmon Edwards delivered an address on “The superiority of Shaw to Shakespeare.” He showed that Shakespeare was a bad dramatist, because he was a great poet; he asserted that his humour was vulgar and his tragedy puerile; and he endeavoured to prove that Shaw was far superior to Shakespeare in his realism, in his critical sense of life, in the depth of his thought, in his stage technique.
At this point, Shaw himself, who was among the audience, rose to his feet and begged to say a few words in favour of his famous rival. What a delicious situation—and one not unworthy of Bernard Shaw!
Compare The English Stage of To-Day, by Mario Borsa, pp. 152-3. John Lane, London and New York, 1908.
[124] Cf. preface to The Quintessence of Ibsenism for its history and the causes which led to its publication. In July, 1890, Mr. Shaw read his Quintessence of Ibsenism in its original form, a study of the socialistic aspect of Ibsen's writings, before the Fabian Society. It is interesting to record what appears to be a reference to this lecture, made by Henrik Ibsen. In a letter to Hans Lien Braekstad (Letters of Henrik Ibsen, translated by John Nilsen Laurvik and Mary Morison, pp. 430-1), a Norwegian-English man of letters (since 1887 resident in London), who has done much for the spread of Norwegian and Danish literature in England, Ibsen wrote from Munich, August, 1890, referring to a garbled report of a newspaper interview with him: